Why Are Hyperlinks Blue? (2021)
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The article 'Why are hyperlinks blue?' from Mozilla's blog sparked a discussion on Hacker News about the origins and reasoning behind the conventional blue color of hyperlinks, with various theories and historical references shared among commenters.
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Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315934
Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperli...
It wasn't just a random or intuitive choice, but the results of many empirical studies and experiments (which is Ben's whole "thing", and unfortunately extremely rare these days):
>“We conducted approximately 20 empirical studies of many design variables which were reported at the Hypertext 1987 conference and in array of journals and books. Issues such as the use of light blue highlighting as the default color for links, the inclusion of a history stack, easy access to a BACK button, article length, and global string search were all studied empirically.”
Hypertext on Hypertext CACM1988 - Ben demonstrating HyperTIES with blue hyperlinks, the system that influenced Tim:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg
Here is my post to the hn discussion of her first article, included an email Ben wrote to me a year before the article, full of citations and links to papers and web pages about it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29921532
>Ben Shneiderman recalled that "Tim told me at the time that he was influenced by our design as he saw it in the Hypertext on Hypertext project".
>Ben Shneiderman wrote the following email to John Gilmore and I, in response to a question John asked me about the origin of the term "hyperlink" raised in a discussion on the Internet History mailing list. John then forwarded Ben's email to the Internet History mailing list.
https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-Apri...
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From: Ben Shneiderman <ben at cs.umd.edu> To: Don Hopkins <don at donhopkins.com> CC: John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com>, Ben Shneiderman <ben at cs.umd.edu> Subject: RE: [ih] origins of the term "hyperlink" X-ASG-Orig-Subj: RE: [ih] origins of the term "hyperlink" Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2020 15:15:52 +0000
HI Don (and Jack Gilmore),
Thanks for including me in this conversation.
I do not have a claim for the term “hyperlinks” and don’t know when it came into use. My claim is for the visual interface for showing highlighted selectable links embedded in paragraphs. This is what we called embedded menu items in that I think is an influential paper on the topic, which was peer-reviewed and published in the CACM in April 1986.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/5684.5687
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/papers/Koved1986Embedded.pdf
While Engelbart had shown a list that could be selected by pointing and clicking in 1968, I claim the idea of embedded highlighted selectable text in paragraphs. This was implemented by grad student Daniel Ostroff and described in:
Ewing J, Mehrabanzad S, Sheck S, Ostroff D and Shneiderman B (1986), "An experimental comparison of a mouse and arrow-jump keys for an interactive encyclopedia", International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, Jan., 1986, Vol 24, pp. 29-45.
[Abstract] [BibTeX] [DOI]
Ostroff D and Shneiderman B (1988), "Selection devices for users of an electronic encyclopedia: an empirical comparison of four possibilities", Information Processing and Management, Nov., 1988, Vol 24(6), pp. 665-680.
[Abstract] [BibTeX] [DOI]
I think the 1988 paper was the earlier study, but the publication took a while.
My students conducted more than a dozen experiments (unpublished) on different ways of highlighting and selection using current screens, e.g. green screens only permitted, bold, underscore, blinking, and I think italic(???). When we had a color screen we tried different color highlighted links. While red made the links easier to spot, user comprehension and recollection of the content declined. We chose the light blue, which Tim adopted.
His systems with embedded menus (or hot spots), where a significant user interface improvement over early systems such as Gopher. But Tim told me at the time that he was influenced by our design as he saw it in the Hypertext on Hypertext project that we used Hyperties to build for the July 1988 CACM that held the articles from the July 1987 Hypertext conference at the University of North Carolina. The ACM sold 4000 copies of our Hypertext on Hypertext disks.
Our history is here:
https://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hyperties/
and the video is very helpful in showing the design we used, which is what I think Tim built on for his WWW prototypes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg
So in summary, I don’t know who coined hypertext, but I do think our work visual and interaction design was influential.
Our Hyperties system was picked up by Cognetics Corporation (around 1987) who made a modestly successful commercial run with it, doing dozens of corporate projects, most notably the Hewlett-Packard user manual for their Laserjet 4 was distributed as a Hyperties disk.
Hyperties was the name we shifted to after we got a stop and desist order from a lawyer because our TIES (The Interactive Encyclopedia System) conflicted with an existing product. By then “hyper” was a growing term.
Let me know if this helps, and what other questions you have…. Ben
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Here's more information about our work on HyperTIES and other stuff like pie menus and tabbed windows at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab:
HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News
https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...
Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland. Published in Hypermedia, vol. 3, 2 (1991)101–117.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi...
The more interesting question is why were backgrounds white rather than black?
I'll still use that as an editing background at times.
so to add to the mix, that with a monochrome display, relatively low rez lighted pixels making letters (on a black background) still has the letters looking pixelated. the same lighted pixels making a white background leaves the black letters looking smoother.
outside of "labs", i remember the VT-100 being the first "white paper" display that was generally in use, but that could have been a regional thing in the shadow of the Maynard mill.
My first excursions on the web were on Macs so I thought something pages were doing some Windows-specific trickery when I first saw the same pages on Windows with white instead of grey backgrounds.
Even a lot of books on HTML in the early days had screenshots from Macs and you'd follow an example on Windows and the output would look different because of the different default background color.
Me: “why did you decide to make links blue?”
Marc: “I sure as hell wasn’t going to make them pink.”
Me: “what about green?”
Marc: “ew”
https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-Apri...
And a couple of relevant papers:
Embedded menus: Selecting Items in Context; Larry Koved and Ben Shneiderman; Communications of the ACM, Computing Practices, April 1986, Volume 29, Number 4, p. 312-318:
https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Koved-Embedded%20Menue...
An experimental comparison of a mouse and arrow-jump keys for an interactive encyclopedia; John Ewing, Simin Mehrabanzad, Scott Sheck, Dan Ostroff and Ben Shneiderman; International Journal of Man Machine Studies (1986) 24, p. 29-45:
https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Ewing-Ostroff-mouse-ar...
I've never needed my browser to tell me what I have and haven't visited. Especially since I use different browsers on different devices, so it's never even accurate anyways.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPO0A7dDvFm/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ...
" In 1985, a group of students at the University of Maryland, mentored by computer science professor Ben Shneiderman , conducted a series of experiments to study the impact of different hyperlink colors on user experience. They were eager to determine which color would be the most effective in terms of visibility and readability.
The experiments revealed interesting findings. While red highlighting made the links more noticeable, it negatively affected users' ability to read and comprehend the surrounding text. On the other hand, blue emerged as the clear winner. It was dark enough to be visible against a white background and light enough to stand out on a black background. Most importantly, it did not interfere with users' retention of the text's context."
Mozille should really do better research before posting histories like this. It's easy to overlook the impact of academic research in tech.
Source:
Barooah, S. (2023, June 09). Why Were Hyperlinks Chosen To Be Blue? Retrieved from https://www.newspointapp.com/english/tech/why-were-hyperlink...
I'm not sure if HyperCard ever had full color support? There was some support for color images in a later version of HyperCard, but did color text ever make it before it was shut down completely?
They were invisible. In HyperCard you could make any region of the screen clickable, and run a script when it was clicked. Not unlike the image maps that websites used to use. You would normally include something visual in the clickable region, but you didn't have to.
I believe the mouse cursor would change if you put it inside a clickable region.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34134403
DonHopkins on Dec 26, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)
Speaking about HyperCard, creating web pages, and publishing live interactive HyperCard stacks on the web, I wrote this about LiveCard:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22283045
DonHopkins on Feb 9, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002)
Check out this mind-blowing thing called "LiveCard" that somebody made by combining HyperCard with MacHTTP/WebStar (a Mac web server by Chuck Shotton that supported integration with other apps via Apple Events)! It was like implementing interactive graphical CGI scripts with HyperCard, without even programming (but also allowing you to script them in HyperTalk, and publish live HyperCard databases and graphics)!
Normal HyperCard stacks would even work without modification. It was far ahead of its time, and inspired me to integrate WebStar with ScriptX to generate static and dynamic HTML web sites and services!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21783227
>In fact, one of the earliest tools that enabled anyone, even children, to author and publish their own interactive dynamic web applications with graphics, text, and even forms and persistent databases, was actually based on HyperCard and the MacHTTP/WebStar web server on the Mac:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16226209
>One of the coolest early applications of server side scripting was integrating HyperCard with MacHTTP/WebStar, such that you could publish live interactive HyperCard stacks on the web! Since it was based on good old HyperCard, it was one of the first scriptable web authoring tools that normal people and even children could actually use!
MacHTTP / WebStar from StarNine by Chuck Shotton, and LiveCard HyperCard stack publisher:
CGI and AppleScript:
http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/cgi-and-applescript/1...
>Cal discusses the Macintosh as an Internet platform, then describes how you can use the AppleScript language for writing CGI applications that run on Macintosh servers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865263
MacHTTP / WebStar from StarNine by Chuck Shotton! He was also VP of Engineering at Quarterdeck, another pioneering company.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110705053055/http://www.astron...
http://infomotions.com/musings/tricks/manuscript/0800-machtt...
http://tidbits.com/article/6292
>It had an AppleScript / OSA API that let you write handlers for responding to web hits in other languages that supported AppleScript.
I used it to integrate ScriptX with the web:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.htm...
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/1995-apple-world-wide-develop...
The coolest thing somebody did with WebStar was to integrate it with HyperCard so you could actually publish live INTERACTIVE HyperCard stacks on the web, that you could see as images you could click on to follow links, and followed by html form elements corresponding to the text fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, drop down menus, scrolling lists, etc in the HyperCard stack that you could use in the browser to interactive with live HyperCard pages!
That was the earliest easiest way that non-programmers and even kids could both not just create graphical web pages, but publish live interactive apps on the web!
Using HyperCard as a CGI application
https://web.archive.org/web/20060205023024/http://aaa-protei...
https://web.archive.org/web/20021013161709/http://pfhyper.co...
http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/cgi-and-applescript/1...
https://web.archive.org/web/19990208235151/http://www.royals...
What was it actually ever used for? Saving kid's lives, for one thing:
>Livecard has exceeded all expectations and allows me to serve a stack 8 years in the making and previously confined to individual hospitals running Apples. A whole Childrens Hospital and University Department of Child Health should now swing in behind me and this product will become core curriculum for our medical course. Your product will save lives starting early 1997. Well done.
- Director, Emergency Medicine, Mater Childrens Hospital
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Also (a historical note about web browsers with editors, not about HyperCard):
NetScape Gold had a built-in WYSIWYG HTML editor window. But it was a unique selling point -- earlier and other versions of browsers didn't support that. Now browsers have official APIs to support WYSIWYG HTML editing via the "contenteditable" attribute, execCommand function, and Selection class, but you have to implement the menus and toolbars of the user interface yourself, and there are a lot of libraries for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape#Netscape_Navigator_(v...
>Netscape also released a Gold version of Navigator 3.0 that incorporated WYSIWYG editing with drag and drop between web editor and email components.[49]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer
https://www.ou.edu/class/webstudy/n4/old/N_GOLD_Editor_Windo...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att...
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/interaction.html#attr...
https://w3c.github.io/editing/docs/execCommand/#execcommand%...
https://w3c.github.io/selection-api/#selection-interface
Note that hyperlinks in hypercard weren't blue necessarily, but the mouse cursor did change to indicate it was clickable.
There's no causal evidence in what you posted.
Sure, the experiments determined blue would be a good color.
But I don't see any evidence that the developers of Mosaic were aware of the research or used that to inform their choice.
It would have made sense for Lynx to settle on blue for ergonomic reasons. ANSI blue is a particular shade thats approximated in hyperlink colors.
But also in the days where some lunatic claimed black-on-gray had more visibility than black-on-white, and every webpage suddenly became, well, like HN.
But I'm old.
I'm not that old!
" This may be an ancestor of our blue hyperlink we know and love today, but I do not believe that this is the first instance of the blue hyperlink since this color is cyan, and not dark blue."
Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperli...
Red is a warning color, also has bad contrast on white background.
Green on white has bad contrast.
Blue has best contrast on both white and black backgrounds, and stands out from black.
Clear winner.
(Virtually everybody who ever made a PowerPoint presentation figured this out)
Why would it matter if it has good contrast on two different backgrounds? If you're changing the color of the background, you can also change the color of the link.
In the days before CSS was commonplace, it would also be very annoying to manage.
> Red is a warning color
That is definitely the case in western culture, but in places like China, red is a positive color. Always interesting to learn what are universal signifiers (like up for more) and what are culture-specific signifiers!
It has to be a dark color, and blue is the darkest of the primary and secondary colors.
With 16 color displays typical at the time, you can use one of the 8 remaining "half brightness" colors. Dark red is still red, and red tends to mean that something is wrong, which is not the message here. Dark blue and grey do not provide enough of a contrast. Dark yellow and dark green look ugly, they use it in generic cigarette packaging for that reason. Dark cyan could have worked I guess, but that's still a shade of blue, so you might as well just use blue.
Go beyond the VGA standard 16 colors and many computers of the time may not render it correctly.
Possibly an incorrect assumption. As several of the screenshots in the article show, the default background color of the web back then was gray, not white.
I could have sworn WinHelp [1] (the help viewer built into Windows 3.0) did it in 1990, but looking it up it turns out their hyperlinks were dark green. My memory had changed them to blue retroactively...
A couple of images:
https://virtuallyfun.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/WinHelp-...
https://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~mgoetsch/cali/Windows%20Config...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinHelp
I certainly don't remember feeling that anything about the first browsers or html was new and surprising. It was more like "oh good someone made a free implementation of that obvious idea". There were plenty of documentation systems used industrially that also had links. Gopher existed.
Ben Shneiderman and his students originally performed experiments that determined that blue was the best color, then Ben developed and ACM distributed HyperTIES with blue links as "Hypertext on Hypertext", which Tim saw, and years later Tim told Ben that it influenced him to make the links blue.
Here is some email between Ben Shneiderman and Mark Andreessen about it that I posted to the Internet History mailing list archive with their permission:
https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-Apri...
Hypertext on Hypertext CACM1988 - Ben demonstrating HyperTIES with blue hyperlinks, the system that influenced Tim:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg
And a couple of relevant papers:
Embedded menus: Selecting Items in Context; Larry Koved and Ben Shneiderman; Communications of the ACM, Computing Practices, April 1986, Volume 29, Number 4, p. 312-318:
https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Koved-Embedded%20Menue...
An experimental comparison of a mouse and arrow-jump keys for an interactive encyclopedia; John Ewing, Simin Mehrabanzad, Scott Sheck, Dan Ostroff and Ben Shneiderman; International Journal of Man Machine Studies (1986) 24, p. 29-45:
https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Ewing-Ostroff-mouse-ar...
If you had a white phosphor terminal, it would have been White on Black.
Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897811 - Jan 2022 (60 comments)
Why are hyperlinks blue? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315934 - Aug 2021 (255 comments)
I also always assumed part of the choice of blue was that in many locales red, yellow and green have connotations of stop/alert, warning and go/okay (respectively) - whereas blue was relatively more agnostic. So... if you're targeting the widest installed base of displays, out of the lowest common denominator choices available blue was pretty much the obvious remaining choice.